Bridge for Africa (BfA) May 2025 Newsletter Highlights: Schedule / Results / Education / Laws / Health / Statistics

Sadly, the Langebaan Bridge Tournament scheduled for Monday 11th August has had to be cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances arising. Thereafter, the ever-popular Bedford teams tournament is scheduled for the weekend of 27th September; full details will be available in July. Kenya Bridge Safaris is organising an event in early December which includes hot air ballooning over the Masai Mara and sessions of bridge and golf at the luxury Swahili Beach Hotel; you can click here to access the flyer. While we're on the subject of exotic bridge, we have had preliminary discussions with Rovos Rail about luxury train trips where you play sessions of bridge while the train trundles through the monotonous countryside between interesting stop offs; if this appeals to you please let me know so we can gauge the interest. If you know of any other bridge events, including charity tournaments, taking place anywhere in Africa in the months ahead, please send me details so we can publicise them and so swell the turnout.

You can click here to view the results of the friendly but competitive 2025 Bidding Box Pairs Tournament won by Bedford's David Girdwood and his partner - the divine lunchtime chicken lasagne was an added ace - and you can click here to view the May 2025 Buccaneer Teams Competition results and log which shows the Pinelands 1A team still leading League 1 and three teams in a tight race to win League 2. Bidding Box 3 continues to lead League 3 and South Cape League 4. Clubs across the region are invited to enter the 2025/26 Buccaneer teams competition which starts in July; just contact Jan Chrobok (+27 82 650-4809) for details.

The results from all BfA club sessions, both face to face and our online sessions on BBO on Tuesdays at 14h00 (log on to BBO and search for BfA) and on RealBridge on Thursday morning and Saturday afternoon, are posted on our Pianola website and can be accessed by clicking on the Results menu item. Congratulations to the following players for achieving the best average in 3+ sessions at their club during May 2025: Annie Schonborn (BfA BBO); Liz Cork and Anne Demattais (Constantina Monday); Wilson McLeod and Anthony Goldstein (Village Monday); Wilson and Jeanne McLeod (Village Thursday); Anne Demattais (Constantiaberg); Dino Zolezzi and Richard Moore (Le Domaine Thursday RealBridge); Dino Zolezzi and Betty Hall (Le Domaine Friday A); Elly Yanko (Le Domaine Friday B); Valmai Bond and Jane Horovsky (Constantina Friday); Jenny Gill (Hermanus Duplicate Bridge Club); Di Elliott (Tokai Estate) and Clyde Mallinson and Bill Wilkie (BfA / Le Domaine Saturday RealBridge). Well done to all of them! You can click on the Competitions button while viewing results in Pianola to see the details of the other contenders in each of these monthly competitions.

Moving to upgrading your bridge skills, here is this month's mini-lesson from top bridge teacher Jeff Sapire: Pre-empts in the 4th seat. After three passes, if you open, say 2S, who are you pre-empting against? No-one! So 4th seat pre-empts are played as ‘constructive’. Not a good hand, but a very top-of-the-range point count, or even a little more. An example of a 2S opening would be SKQT653 H72 DAQ4 C85. An extra reason for doing this is that you want to try to keep the opponents quiet, and opening 1S may let them in. On the popular Bridge Tips page and downloadable PDF on the BfA website, we have now created separate sections for tips related to competitive, pre-emptive and slam bidding as the list of bidding tips was getting unmanageable.

With the cellphone based BriAn bridge scoring app now being successfully used at the Constantiaberg, Constantina, Village and Tokai Estate clubs in Cape Town and at Le Domaine club near Durban, this last month saw training sessions held for four smaller clubs on the KZN north coast and in Mpumulanga and the Eastern Cape. None of these clubs has access to pre-dealt boards, so they will be trying out BriAn's innovative feature for quickly recording hands on their cellphones at the end of the first round. We look forward to their feedback - and to seeing other small clubs around the country following suit. Victor Lesk, the BriAn proprietor, has also agreed that our players can use the app at no cost to score their regular afternoon social team-of-four sessions; contact me for details.

According to the World Health Organization, more than 55 million people worldwide suffer from dementia, including 242,000 in South Africa. The Global Burden of Disease forecasts a 181% increase in dementia prevalence in South Africa between 2019 and 2050. In addition, dementia and Alzheimer’s disease are major causes of death for the elderly. On a much more positive note, research also shows that, in addition to exercise and nutrition, ongoing mental stimulation and regular social interactions, both of which are provided by playing bridge frequently, assist in keeping dementia at bay. Accordingly, we have proposed to Discovery Health that they partner with Bridge for Africa to create a new Discovery Bridge Vitality Program aimed at rewarding bridge players for playing regularly. Bridge clubs around the country - or indeed in all 42 countries where Discovery's Vitality program now operates - would use the BriAn app or Bridgemates to score their sessions, with the results being uploaded to the BfA Pianola website and automatically transferred from there to Vitality where members would be allocated points and rewards, all in all a mental medication win-win for both Discovery and bridge players. We'll let you know if and when they respond to our proposal; if you have friends with influence at Discovery, maybe you could get them to help shepherd our proposal to approval?

In our recent newsletters we summarised the procedures to be followed when a common rules infringement takes place. This month we look at what happens when a card is exposed during the bidding and once again New Zealand Bridge has produced a flowchart which can be accessed from the TD Corner page of the BfA website. Of course, when there is a recognized tournament director officiating, then their rulings prevail and on the TD corner we are now including a new case study each month showing how a TD might deal with a complaint.

Turning to BfA statistics, during the past 30 days our member clubs recorded the results of 520 tables of bridge on Pianola; 995 players have played in tournaments at BfA clubs since April 2024 when we started operations. This newsletter now goes to most of the more than 1,900 players in our Pianola player database to assist them to play more and better bridge. The Google map of African bridge clubs has been viewed 8,903 times since it was created. Apart from the Home Page, the most popular pages on the BfA website in May were the Results, News and Bridge Tips pages followed by the Learn Bridge page.

Bridge for Africa is a non-profit company which assists bridge players in Africa to play more and better bridge by providing Internet marketing, scoring and administrative services to clubs currently ranging from the largest in South Africa's Western Cape and Kwa-Zulu Natal to amongst the smallest. You will find previous editions of our newsletters in the news section of the Bridge for Africa website. We welcome enquiries from other African bridge clubs interested in using our services.

As usual we look forward to your comments and feedback. We look forward to seeing you playing at our clubs and in our online sessions during June.